Arrow: Trust but Verify
by Riptide2
Summary: Episode tag for 1:11 "Trust but Verify". Oliver knew why he'd chosen Diggle as his partner: he had training, he saw the good in people (even playboy, billionaire vigilantes), and the man definitely hadn't survived by being an idiot. But could he trust Dig... more than even a worn out old book?


**Arrow: Trust but Verify**

Diggle beats him back to the Arrow Cave, and cringes a little when that's the title that automatically jumps to mind. It's a ridiculous nickname and he knows it but nothing could really get worse than _The Hood Guy_ so until the vigilante in question decides to help him out on the naming front he'll go with it. Oliver should have easily gotten here first and the fact that he isn't already hanging from the pull up bar or lodging green arrows in tennis balls spells a small piece of disaster. He's come through three tours in Afghanistan though and there's _no way_ that Queen is scarier than that, so he sits down to wait for the inevitable storm.

Dig's just about done field stripping his pistol, an army habit that he can't seem to shake, when he hears the hiss of hydraulic hinges from the floor above and has to stamp down on the urge to go out the newly constructed back door. Oliver's not going to be happy and John's not really in any sort of mood to hear about the validity of his crusade again, but the only way to get through to his _client_ is head on so he waits as green booted feet thump down the stairs and that brings with it another little piece of looming apocalypse. Oliver is always quiet when he moves and he's snuck up on Diggle more times than the bodyguard turned accomplice cares to remember, but if he's angry enough not to bother with stealth than he can upgrade the rapidly approaching confrontation to hurricane status.

He jumps the last three steps and then stalks across the room to his weapon stands as Dig turns to face him. The knuckles of the Hood's black leather gloves are a little bloody as they're stripped off and thrown somewhere in the general vicinity of the computer desk and there's two arrows missing from around his left wrist, and John can't help but wonder which gang bangers or convenience store robbers Oliver decided to pick a fight with tonight. It's one of his newer coping methods, prowling around the Glades beating up on anything that moves, but it has to be better than the silent brooding so Diggle lets that one slide for now.

He's already pulled back the hood and wiped off the green face paint, and as Dig watches his quiver gets tossed at one of the worktables, sending a tool kit clattering to the floor. He calms down enough not to outright _throw_ his bow, though John half suspects that's only because he'll break something if he does and since Oliver treats that bow like his first born damaging it is still sacrilege no matter how pissed off he is. As it is the weapon gets banged down on the third of the desks, half-finished arrow heads skittering across the metal surface before following the tool kit's rapid descent to the floor like they too can feel the anger rolling off the leather clad figure.

And then Oliver's getting in his face, practically vibrating with righteous wrath as he throws Diggle's own actions back in his face, "I could have shot you, I could have killed you!_ What the hell were you thinking?"_

Dig's pushing it and he knows it, but honestly Oliver's not the only one who can play the self-righteous card and he's getting a little sick of this whole my-way-or-the-highway attitude. He steps up in the kid's face, crowding him back against the desk as he points an accusing finger in cadence with his words, "I'm not going to let you William Tell an innocent man."

Queen's eyes narrow at the invasion of his personal little bubble and John has to wonder if he hasn't pushed the issue a little too far. The Oliver he met four months ago would have put an arrow in him already for pulling a gun like he did in Ted's office, but they've done a lot together since then between fending off Detective Lance's vendetta against the Hood and the whole Other Archer fiasco and even before that waking up in the vigilante's hide out after a curare laced bullet he was never honestly afraid of Oliver. There were times when he was wary of what he could do sure, but even then he'd never _feared_ the kid. It's that knowledge that lets him keep going now.

And Dig's right, at least to a point. Oliver doesn't attack him, but he doesn't quite back down either and as Diggle watches a flash of some unexplained memory plays out in his eyes, a flicker of emotion that goes by so quick he would have missed it had he not been standing less than a foot away. Mistrust, betrayal, the unspoken question of John's loyalty is all there open for him to see, and then Oliver turns away, hands clenching around the edge of the table as he puts his back to Dig and it isn't the display of trust that is usually is, but more a way of holding onto some semblance of control. He's proven right a second later by the vigilante's frustrated growl, "Gaynor isn't innocent, Diggle."

"You seem to think that mainly because of what's in your damn book." He snaps before he gets the chance to really process what he just saw and when Oliver turns on him again he can see his mistake. The walls are back up, the shutters drawn, and abruptly he's talking to the Hood again, not the man beneath it. The change happens in a split second, like a switch being thrown, and all of a sudden Diggle can see the truth behind that ridiculously stoic mask. Oliver trusted him enough to allow himself to show emotion and he's just thrown it back in his face. Unwittingly or not, he's not entirely sure it'll matter and the fact that he cares as much as he does startles him into blurting out, "Which you apparently trust more than you trust me."

He's hit the nail on the head and he realizes it the second after it comes out of his mouth. Oliver seems to see it too, and that imaginary switch gets eased back on. The kid's cautious this time though with exactly how much he shows and as he slips away from between Diggle and the desk he'd had Oliver backed up against and reclaims his space there's still an edge of wariness there, the mistrust hidden but not gone. "I trust-" Oliver starts then his voice breaks, another flicker of some no doubt horrific memory in his eyes, the kind of PTSD flashback that would keep a therapist busy for weeks playing across his face before he tries again, "I trust my father. And he explained to me that every name on that list has a _reason_ to be there."

That brings Diggle up short, he can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times Oliver has voluntarily talked about his father and if he's doing it now then there has to be a damn good reason. _I found that when I buried him. _He clearly remembers the last time Oliver opened up about what happened, in the middle of trying to convince him to join the mission he'd brought up how Robert Queen had shot himself to give his son a chance to survive, and now Dig frowns at the latest revelation, either Oliver was lying to him then or there's a lot more here than he's cared to share. He's painfully aware that the former is all too possible, and if that's the case then so help him, freaky ninja skills or not he'll rip Oliver and his vigilante attitude a new one. "I thought you took that book off your father's dead body. How could he have been so chatty?"

He takes a step forward as he's punching a hole in Oliver's explanation, moving before he actually stops to think about it and then does actually stop when he catches the kid's eyes following him, tracking his movements in a way that's surprisingly more wary prey than the overconfident predator that Dig usually sees. He can take on a small army singlehandedly and even if Diggle had decided to try to attack him he doesn't stand an ice cube's chance in hell of really getting anywhere, but Oliver's being as open with him as he can be anymore and on some level Dig can see that flicker of betrayal in his eyes again, but he's a little too pissed off about the possibility of getting lied to for the umpteenth time to feel all that bad about pushing him.

Oliver frowns, eyes going over Diggle's left shoulder to stare at some indiscriminate spot on the foundry wall before he answers and this time the openness is gone like he's just realized that he's already said too much, "A few years ago I found a message he left me explaining the list."

Dig refuses to back down though, not this time. He's just about to the point of questioning his sanity and _this _is when Oliver decides to shut him out again? He knows better than to try for intimidation, he'd have better luck banging his head against a brick wall though the headache this whole situation is starting to give him is pretty similar, so instead he stands his ground and tries the direct route, it's the only one that works anyway. "Oliver, _how_ is that possible? You were on a deserted island."

And there's that damn switch again. Oliver's gaze flickers down to the ground, but Dig can still see the flash of genuine anger that runs through his eyes in the second before that stoic mask makes a reappearance and his expression goes blank. It's the Hood, not Oliver that glares up at him until Diggle's the one that backs down, "I didn't say that I found it on the island."

And against his better judgement Dig nods, steps back, tries to give him his space because as much as the Hood is a disguise to protect his family from reprisals, it's also another one of Oliver's coping methods. There's Oliver Queen the scarred kid that hates thunderstorms and can't sleep and then there's the Hood the slightly jaded saviour that can be beaten but never broken with the silent fury and the avenging _'You have failed this city'_ and they're almost like two completely different personas living in the same body, except that Dig's figured out the _why _along with the _who._ It's in moments like these that he can see the fact that the two different faces of this double life that he's helping Oliver pull off are more entangled than probably even he realizes. The Hood's the shield that the kid who missed ice cream and his girlfriend hides behind and as much as the vigilante is Oliver's way of honoring his father it's also a defense mechanism, one that he probably wouldn't have survived without but they're so tangled up that he's not entirely sure that Oliver knows _how _to be that person who trusts others enough to show what he's feeling anymore.

He hadn't noticed it at first, not really, sure there were the moments when the public mask slipped and it was either a snapshot of the vigilante's ruthlessness or the raw emotion of the damaged soul that walked through hell and back that made it to the surface, but those moments came and went in half the space of a heartbeat. A flicker of broken grief in the courtroom as he described for the judge what happened the night the _Queen's Gambit_ sank, a threat veiled by a joke to the best friend that was now dating his ex, the blank expression and stoic mask that made an appearance every time someone got too close. Still it hadn't been until he'd spent a night at Oliver's side in the hospital after that other Archer had shot him up that Dig had really seen both sides of the coin without them leaching into one another. It had been Oliver that had almost gotten firebombed by Garfield Lynns, but the Hood that had shot a lighter out of his hand and saved the fire chief. It had been Oliver that Dig had pinned to the desk, and the Hood that had fought back. And somewhere along the way Diggle had come to see the razor edge that Oliver walked, the line that separated the boy who'd been shipwrecked from the man who could jump off rooftops and wage war against a city full of criminals and if he was triggering that defense mechanism now, then it was time to let it go. He wasn't going to get anything more out of him this way so he backed down, not about Ted Gaynor because there was still no way that the man who Dig followed into battle was now knocking over armored cars no matter what that book said, but about trying to force Oliver to open up to him about what happened on that island.

Oliver sees the half step back that he takes for the partial retreat that it is and a little of that openness comes back into his expression, it's careful and cautious, just enough to try to get him to understand with an edge of the vigilante's quiet rage simmering underneath that warns him to take what he can get and leave it at that. "Diggle, for the past four months I have lied to, hurt, and hid things from all the people that I care about. Do you really think that I would do _all_ of this if I wasn't _sure_?"

Diggle watches him for a moment, trying to see if he'll add something more and then looks away when Oliver's blue eyes start to harden, taking his silence as a challenge that isn't actually there. There isn't much Dig can say at this point that won't just push the kid away again, so he tries to reason with him. Oliver wants him to understand that he trusts the list because he trusts his father, and that's fine, but right now he needs Oliver to try to understand something too, the fact that he trusts Ted with his life not only out of loyalty to a commanding officer but because they've walked through fire and brimstone and an Afghani desert together, "Oliver listen, Gaynor got me into Blackhawk."

Oliver shifts, half turning away, a flicker of betrayal back in his eyes for the third time in as many minutes, and Dig keeps going, trying to make him at least attempt to see this from someone else's perspective before he gets completely stonewalled again, "And I'm _going_ to prove he's innocent."

He starts to walk away, snatches up the mostly reassembled pieces of his gun, and lets the kid have his space when he sees those blue eyes shift again. He looks like he's at least _trying_ to understand and that's more than Diggle thought he'd get at the beginning of this. He's proven wrong though a second later, "If he isn't?"

Queen's voice is quiet, like he knows how much this blatant inability of his to even consider Gaynor as innocent is going to piss Diggle off and it does. Oliver's not looking at him, but Dig doesn't doubt for a minute that he's still being watched as he jams the clip on his Beretta home and sees blue eyes flicker to the weapon for half a second, wariness warring with trust before he goes back to studying that specific spot on the concert block walls that only Oliver seems to be able to see.

"You owe me that." Dig snaps, holstering his gun as he turns to see if he's even managed to get an ounce of understanding, but Oliver's expression has gone blank again and that's when Dig feels honest to goodness anger at the kid's refusal to trust his opinion of what Ted's capable of, because that's the heart of this isn't it? Oliver doesn't trust him over that book, and with a flash of vindictiveness Dig has to wonder why he ever expected anything different. He's put his life on the line, and his freedom if the good detective ever catches up to them, and in Dig's opinion that warrants a little trust but obviously Oliver has a different definition of the word _partner_.

Dig turns away only long enough to snag his jacket off the back of the chair, and then he gets in the kid's face again, vaguely aware of the fact that Oliver's eyes have hardened and the vigilante's making a reappearance, "You owe me at least that."

He's not talking about Ted anymore and they both know it, but Diggle doesn't give him a chance to respond as he brushes past and he certainly doesn't see the flicker of memory that plays out in Oliver eyes as he heads for the stairs.

**AN: **Basically this is all I had planned, but I might write a couple other scenes from the episode with Oliver and Dig that stood out to me and add them on to this eventually. For now though it's a one shot that might get turned into a two or three short chapter story. That said: Please review! It's my first time writing for Arrow and well I've written plenty for other books and TV shows (mainly NCIS: LA, though those aren't posted on ) it's always great to hear your opinions and suggestions! Thank you, Riptide2


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